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The chal­lenge for the Church and for the the­olo­gians was to say okay, per­haps that’s what is writ­ten. But for exam­ple if you con­sid­er that God has deliv­ered the Creation in sev­en days, know­ing that nowa­days Amazon can deliv­er every­thing on Earth overnight, it means that Jeff Bezos has defeat­ed God? Or does it mean some­thing dif­fer­ent? And I think it means prob­a­bly some­thing dif­fer­ent.

The real­i­ty is we have been so busy call­ing peo­ple names, obsess­ing over bor­ders and walls, and spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion that we haven’t even asked hard ques­tions like why do peo­ple move? What does US for­eign pol­i­cy and US trade agree­ments have to do with migra­tion pat­terns? Remember when those chil­dren start­ed walk­ing from Central America to here, and CBS News and a lot of orga­ni­za­tions called them ​“ille­gal immi­grant” chil­dren instead of call­ing them the refugees that they are? What did we do to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala so that their coun­tries got so vio­lent that they have to come here? Who start­ed the drug war? What did NAFTA do not only to the United States but to Mexicans, right?

I was 25 years old when I went to law school. I was 28 when I came out. And I was a bit old­er than the rest of the kids in law school. And when I came out, I was equal­ly qual­i­fied be a tax attor­ney or a civ­il lit­i­ga­tor or an enter­tain­ment lawyer. And I just chose to be a pros­e­cu­tor. No spe­cial train­ing. No spe­cial equip­ment. No spe­cial tools.

Conspiracies are per­fect for sim­ple think­ing. Because con­spir­a­cy is by def­i­n­i­tion some­thing that explains every­thing. A real­ly great con­spir­a­cy explains some­thing that has already hap­pened and some­thing that’s going to hap­pen.

What I’m try­ing artic­u­late here is that there is a real­ly fine bal­ance between how do you spur and invig­o­rate inno­va­tion, and then also address secu­ri­ty at the same time. Because one can­not drown out the oth­er. Because you’re going to have all kinds of issues.

I think in order to under­stand why the Pirate Party came about as a polit­i­cal par­ty, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment and by the cul­tur­al lob­by­ists in par­tic­u­lar. And what kinds of mea­sures were being lob­bied for by the cul­tur­al indus­tries, espe­cial­ly the sur­veil­lance of people’s online behav­ior, which we’ve only learned prob­a­bly years lat­er was going to become a much broad­er prob­lem for a fun­da­men­tal rights.

I’m going to make an argu­ment in this talk that dis­sent is valu­able not mere­ly to estab­lish your moral dimen­sion or to make a moral act or moral pos­ture. It’s essen­tial to sci­en­tif­ic progress. So we can’t do with­out dis­sent; it’s not an affec­ta­tion.

Part of what’s real­ly inter­est­ing at the moment is that most peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly young peo­ple, don’t have a lot of faith in insti­tu­tions. They’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly excit­ed about this idea that we go to the polls, we elect rep­re­sen­ta­tives, those rep­re­sen­ta­tives speak for us and that is how change hap­pens.

Behind-the-scenes plan­ning is often over­looked by observers and by the media because it’s what the cam­eras often can’t cap­ture. I’ve wit­nessed it for fif­teen years at the Albert Einstein Institution. This qui­et capacity-building and struc­tur­al work. The plan­ning and prepa­ra­tions that make move­ments more effec­tive.